1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to various methods, systems, computer program products, and other arrangements for remotely monitoring any of a variety of appliances or devices, for sending monitoring information across any of various networks, for receiving the monitoring information, and for storing and analyzing the monitored information.
2. Discussion of the Background
With the advent of microprocessors, microprocessor-based appliances and devices have become more intelligent. In addition, the increase of networking through wireline and wireless technology makes communication among those intelligent appliances and devices possible. The next extension to this development is to create systems in which the configuration and status of these appliances and devices are monitored and sent by a monitoring system to a receiving system.
Co-pending U.S. application Ser. No. 09/756,120, filed on Jan. 9, 2001, describes a system for remotely monitoring networked devices using email. Email messages are sent across networks, the email messages containing configuration, status or other information.
Because of the wide variety of types of devices that may be monitored (printers, refrigerators, and so forth), a large number of types of messages must be communicated. Also, a wide variety of information specific to each type of device, such as that relating to make and model, device serial numbers, device locations, malfunction indications, service requests, and so forth, has to be transmitted.
In conventional arrangements, it may be necessary to design and implement a different scheme for each message type (configuration, status, and so forth) and for each data structure. Moreover, when the information to be communicated changes, such as when a new type of device, a new message type or different message content arises, the scheme for defining the message type and/or data structure must be modified. This repeated design, implementation and revision, are costly and time-consuming. Accordingly, communication techniques that are frozen to specific message types and data structures are not well suited to communicating information relating to monitoring or supporting devices of many different types.